When I am trying to learn a new skill or develop thinking around a subject, such as data storytelling, I find examples of others work helpful. The trick to reviewing work is thinking about what is effective, not what is good or bad. Sometimes I learn more from the examples that are ineffective then the effective ones. The effective examples are just good and you know …

In December 2017, SAS Visual Analytics 8.2 was recently released along with some fantastic functionality. Here’s the seven features that I find useful.

1 – Autosave and Auto Recovery

I’ve made the mistake of walking away from a browser session with a report I was building. True I didn’t save it but to my defense I didn’t think I’d be gone so long. Inevitably the report would close, and I would lose all of my work. SAS Visual Analytics does an autosave of your report and offers to restore the report the next time you open the report. This is first on my list probably because I’m so forgetful and easily distracted.

2 – Replace the Active Data Table

If you made a change to your data table and wanted to replace the data table, it wasn’t always obvious what was going on. Plus, you had to unload the data and then re-load the data. This new import interface makes it easy to understand that you are replacing the data.

You can take advantage of cloud-based data. If you have data on your Google drive, you can import it directly to SAS Viya. It can even be a Google spreadsheet. Watch this …

3 – Easy to Create Aggregated Data Items

How about easier calculations – for instance I can easily create the Cumulative or Rolling Average values based on a measure. Just create a new calculation and then select the aggregation that you want.

Here’s an example of the Moving Average plotted with the actual values. Easy!

4 – Undo/Redo Function

This Undo/Redo functionality is helpful. When you are designing a report sometimes you realize the way you had the object was preferable. As far as I can tell it applies to the last few actions in the report. It did allow me to remove several objects and a page that I had inserted.

5 – Duplicate Object as Another Data Object

You can duplicate the current data object. Or you can duplicate the object as another object! If you have a bar chart, you can duplicate it as a table or dual axis bar chart. Whatever makes more sense to your current report goal. All with one click of the button.

6 – Assigning Geographic Items is Easier

When creating geographic data items, you get lots of extra information. When I assigned the customer country I see that two country names were invalid. It’s true! The SAS lookup tables have a country called “Russian Federation” but not a “Russia”. This is help – now I can update my data tables.

7 – Control the Background Map Brightness

You can use Open Street Maps for your data or you can use one of the ESRI maps. Sometimes I think the ESRI maps are a little bright and don’t allow enough contrast. You can control the brightness by changing the background transparency.

There are some other features I’m anxious to try. You can add JavaScript D3 and other interactive charts which I think will be fun. You can also add your own shape maps. This is going to take a little more time to learn so keep watch for some future posts.

Color may have the most impact on your design. People react strongly to color either through culture values or personal choices. As with fonts, color is another element of style. And just like fonts, colors communicate meaning as well. [Read: Understanding the Importance of Color in Reporting] SAS offers many pre-chosen styles or palettes that work well. You may want to distinguish your dashboard from …

Recently I was asked to create a Web Analytics dashboard on spec. I decided to use the latest version SAS Visual Analytics 8.1 so I could review the new features. When we wrote the Introduction to SAS Visual Analytics book, we were using beta versions of the application. Here’s some of the process I used while working on creating the Web Analytics report.
Getting the Right …

Are you considering submitting an abstract for SAS Global Forum 2017? Maybe you have already read the posts about how it helps your career and the excitement of sharing ideas. What is holding you back? Maybe you don’t have an idea, maybe you fear presentations, or maybe you just are unsure of the process.
I don’t have a idea
I bet this is the number one concern …

I like to read the SAS Visual Analytics area of SAS Communities site. From the site I have overcome issues I had as well as learned other ways to think how you can solve common issues. As many long time SAS users know – there’s always more than one way to accomplish something with SAS! Recently, as user was asking how to expand parameters to create a …

A dashboard starts with planning. In my last post, we talked about gauges and when you want to use them. In this post, we will apply the gauges to a dashboard. Gauges cannot live by themselves – they need supporting information. It must be clear how the information supports the gauges. I’ll use the same dashboard but with some different gauges. You can determine what worked …